1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to storage systems, more particularly, to method and apparatus for scheduling data movers in a data storage system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data storage system, generally, includes a plurality of data movers and an array of physical disk drives (e.g., ATA disks, fibre channel disks, a tape library and any other data storage device). A data mover, in any type of data storage system, refers to the function (e.g., process) that is able to push or pull (e.g., send or receive, respectively) data over a communication interface or port to or from various computing environments (e.g., various platforms, protocols, systems and the like). Data movers, generally, include data transfer systems, devices and/or software that utilize the capabilities of the data storage system (e.g., data backup, duplication and/or recovery systems) to quickly and reliably move data from one location (e.g., a client computer, a database and the like) to another location (e.g., tape library, disk drives and the like). For example, the data movers read data from one data storage device) and transfer the data to another data storage device.
The data mover may be an abstract machine running on a media server and serving as an interface for a master server in the storage system. For example, the data mover is an instance of middleware (e.g., software comprising a collection of algorithms for communicating data for a variety of applications, such as data backup, recovery and duplication tasks) executed by the media server.
In a multi-node distributed data protection system (e.g., multiple data movers, backup libraries, media servers and the like), a large number of concurrent and/or successive backup, restore or duplication tasks must be initiated and executed optimally (e.g., in the shortest time period possible or with a minimal amount of involvement from the master server). In this multi-node distributed data protection, a plurality of data movers of various capabilities perform the backup, duplication and/or restore tasks. Occasionally, the data movers are non-optimally scheduled and the data protection system suffers from overloaded or underutilized data movers. As a result, backup, duplication or restore tasks are not completed or completed non-optimally (e.g., a significant amount of time to perform the tasks).
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for scheduling data movers in order to optimally perform backup, duplication or restore tasks.